What is beauty? There is far more to the question than meets the eye. "Beauty
is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,"
John Keats so confidently declared.

Angelina Jolie is voted to be the top beauty in the world.
[AP]

But the truth is that beauty is a
deeply tangled problem - and debating its definition can raise some pretty ugly
arguments.

Certainly the philosophers, artists and poets who, over the centuries, have
set out to present or explain it have achieved no consensus, as Umber to Eco's
recent publication of a vast and heterogeneous compendium of opinions on the
subject has once again reaffirmed.

Anyone from Xenophon to Baudelaire, from Sappho to Shakespeare has offered an
opinion.

For Polykleitus writing his (now lost) canon, beauty was found in a system of
mathematically defined proportion. For Picasso, there was no such thing as
beauty at all.

For Botticelli, Venus was an ethereally lyrical, slippery-hipped sylph, for
Rubens she was a rubicund sensualist revelling in a luscious spillage of fat.

In ancient and medieval times, it may have been viewed more as a mental or
spiritual quality than a physical property, but once the Renaissance had arrived
and the modern world as we understand it was beginning to take shape, ideals of
beauty were increasingly dependent on the endlessly mutating vagaries of fashion
and style. Capitalism has become a more powerful ethos than Christianity. Beauty
has become a commodity.

Chinese actress
Zhang Ziyi also made the top beauty list, ranking 15.
[Xinhua]

There is no one ideal. Images range
from the cheetah-limbed litheness of Christie Turlington to the wrinkling
dignity of Charlotte Rampling, from the polished Oriental smoothness of Zhang
Ziyi to the dark voluptuous curves of Nigella Lawson, and at the top of the
Harpers and Queen list, the actress Angelina Jolie.

What they share is success. They are touting that most lucrative of
commodities: unsatisfied desire. They are selling an impossible perfection that,
even if we could reach it, would slip away with the onset of the next style.

When Zeuxis set out to depict the legendary, ship-launching beauty of Helen
of Troy, he amalgamated five different faces, like some classical photo-fit. The
finished image is now lost.

This only goes to prove that no one is the most beautiful woman in the world.